BTW, I am working on part 2 of this post, but many other plates must be kept spinning…

Similarly, the strong separation between programmers and writers, by separating concerns with interaction and writing, seems like it could limit creative possibilities, or at the least create a communication bottleneck in the team. Noah, Did James have a sense of any missed opportunities created by this separation?

As for Murder on the Mississippi, this was a game from around 1985. I had a dumb terminal from Activision and wrote directly to their PDP11, and my job was to create the characters and write the dialog, though I had a pretty big hand in designing the paddleboat as well. Someone else added puzzles for game play. Most of my work was done in play form, simple dialog in short scenes so the plot would play out, with many alternate speeches for the characters depending on game play.

Hope this contributes something to the discussion. Very interesting.

Taking that into account, the question for Molyneux — and for Noah — is: Should Fable be considered an adventure game, or does it attempt to transcend the genre? Given Noah’s brief introduction to the game, I can’t see how the mention of “hoop-jumping” and an obsession with simulated worlds does enough to pull this game out of the genre in a meaningful way. These are just bullet points for a marketing campaign. Other than that, the thing which will presumably set Fable apart from other games of the genre is its high fidelity. Which means it is sure to catch the eyes of plenty of game “critics”, regardless of whether or not it says something interesting about the genre.

As for the rest of what Noah describes, it is interesting to see how the writing process is applied, but it doesn’t offer any surprises. Here we have game production that is eager to embrace production values on a Hollywood level. Again, the game “critics” are sure to take note. Not such a good thing for independent game development.

My thesis was on actual role playing in computer role playing games, and I am anxious to see if Fable begins to address some of the issues that keep computer role playing games from feeling like role playing.

I agree with both Josh and Nick….I don’t think its a matter of fine details in a simulation (eating a can of soup, brushing your teeth, etc.) so much as creating a sense of world consistancy with believable consequences for player character actions.

I can think of many ways in which a lack of simulation can detract from the game experience. In a 3-D game, any time my urge to explore the immediate area is hindered by an artificial boundary that doesn’t correspond well to the visual world, I’m annoyed. (Splinter Cell had a few bad cases of this.) In an IF, any time the game fails to simulate an object which it just described as being present, I’m annoyed. (Mentioning that I can’t do anything with it is fine, but telling me “You can’t see that” is not.)

This isn’t to say that further simulation will somehow magically make a game better, but I think that it adds to the experience and can certainly break it if done poorly. (Although now I wonder if ‘poorly’ and ‘less’ aren’t the same thing, and my negative examples were the former. Whoops.)

Hopefully some of what you’re wondering about the specificity of the relationship between Fable’s story and its simulated world will be answered in my second post on this topic. (I agree that what’s in this post is nothing more than a teaser.)

I’d definitely be interested in the answer that someone like Rob Swigart would give to your other question. Do you think we might entice him to come by and offer some thoughts?

I wonder which adventure games you or the Fable team are thinking about that are based on hoop-jumping? Is “You need to be nominated before you are allowed entry. And note that your Guild Seal won’t work in here.” not an indication of a “hoop” in Fable?

And which ones don’t simulate a world? I don’t think Myst offers a very rich simulation, but any adventure game I can think of seems to try to offer some sort of simulation.

The failings of adventure games such as The 7th Guest don’t really seem to be caused by some lack of simulation — as if the game would be better if our character could grow older, grow horns, open the soup cans and have a snack, get tired and have to sleep, and so on. Nor do they seem to be caused by the mere presence of puzzles in the first place. Rather, I think the problem is in the way those puzzles fail to connect to the simulated world, the characters in it, the events in it, and its overall “riddle.”

More extreme and unmotivated sorts of simulation (hunger and sleep in Planetfall, for instance) are often actually pointed out as flaws in interactive fiction, so it doesn’t encourage me to read that an adventure game is a more detailed simulation, any more than a high polygon count assures me that a game will be good. (In fact, for the same sort of reason, too much focus on the richness of a simulation often worries me.) However, I trust that Molyneux, Leach, and others on the team have thought through the experience of the game and the ways in which it can be enriched by this greater simulation, so I’m quite interested to see how that plays out.

On another topic, I wonder how much Leach’s writing experience differs from that of a writer like Rob Swigart (Hacker, Portal, Murder on the Mississippi) who was writing both the scenarios and dialog for graphical adventure games about 20 years ago? I’d be particularly interested to know what things about this process have changed and which ones are similar to those in adventure game development from the home computer era.

[writing for games]

Noah’s written a useful post showing the development of the writing for the soon-to-be-released game Fable. It [...]